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This book provides an introduction to current work and new directions in the study of medieval liturgy. It focuses primarily on so-called occasional rituals such as burial, church consecration, exorcism and excommunication rather than on the Mass and Office. Recent research on such rites challenges many established ideas, especially about the extent to which they differed from place to place and over time, and how the surviving evidence should be interpreted. These essays are designed to offer guidance about current thinking, especially for those who are new to the subject, want to know more about it, or wish to conduct research on liturgical topics. Bringing together scholars working in different disciplines (history, literature, architectural history, musicology and theology), time periods (from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries) and intellectual traditions, this collection demonstrates the great potential that liturgical evidence offers for understanding many aspects of the Middle Ages. It includes essays that discuss the practicalities of researching liturgical rituals; show through case studies the problems caused by over-reliance on modern editions; explore the range of sources for particular ceremonies and the sort of questions which can be asked of them; and go beyond the rites themselves to investigate how liturgy was practised and understood in the medieval period.
Named a Library Journal Best Reference of 2023 - "Bravo! An invaluable source for scholars and concertgoers.” - Library Journal In the history of the Western musical tradition, the Baroque period traditionally dates from the turn of the 17th century to 1750. The beginning of the period is marked by Italian experiments in composition that attempted to create a new kind of secular musical art based upon principles of Greek drama, quickly leading to the invention of opera. The ending is marked by the death of Johann Sebastian Bach in 1750 and the completion of George Frideric Handel’s last English oratorio, Jephtha, the following year. The Historical Dictionary of Baroque Music, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 500 cross-referenced entries on composers, instruments, cities, and technical terms. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about baroque music.
The tradition of Old Hispanic liturgical chant is here examined through a new methodology, enabling striking new insights into its use.
City, Chant, and the Topography of Early Music explores how space, urban life, landscape, and time transformed plainchant and other musical forms. Thirteen essays address a wide range of topics and regions--from Beneventan chant in Italy and Dalmatia, to music theory in medieval France, to later transformations of chant in Iceland and Spain.
Spanning a millennium of musical history, this monumental volume brings together nearly forty leading authorities to survey the music of Western Europe in the Middle Ages. All of the major aspects of medieval music are considered, making use of the latest research and thinking to discuss everything from the earliest genres of chant, through the music of the liturgy, to the riches of the vernacular song of the trouvères and troubadours. Alongside this account of the core repertory of monophony, The Cambridge History of Medieval Music tells the story of the birth of polyphonic music, and studies the genres of organum, conductus, motet and polyphonic song. Key composers of the period are introduced, such as Leoninus, Perotinus, Adam de la Halle, Philippe de Vitry and Guillaume de Machaut, and other chapters examine topics ranging from musical theory and performance to institutions, culture and collections.
Drawing on a wide context of bookmaking, this sweeping study traces fundamental changes in books made to support musical practice during the Carolingian Renaissance. During the late eighth and ninth centuries, there were dramatic changes in the way European medieval scribes made books for singers, moving from heavy reliance on unwritten knowledge to the introduction of musical notation into manuscripts. Well-made liturgical books were vital to the success of the Carolingian fight for Christian salvation: these were the basis for carrying out worship correctly, rendering it most effective in petitions to the Christian God. In Sounding the Word of God, Susan Rankin explores Carolingian concern with the expression and control of sound in writing—discernible through instructions for readers and singers visible in liturgical books. Her central focus is on books made for singers, including those made for priests. The emergence of musical notations for ecclesiastical chant and of books designed to accommodate those notations, Rankin concludes, are important aspects of the impact of Carolingian reforming zeal on material culture. The book has three sections. Part 1 considers late antique and early medieval texts, which deal with the value of singing and its necessary regulation. Part 2 describes and investigates techniques used by Carolingian scribes to provide instructions for readers and singers. The extant books themselves are the focus of part 3. Rankin’s analysis of over two hundred manuscripts and extensive supporting images represents the work of a scholar who has spent a lifetime with the sources; her explication of the images, particularly those of the earlier manuscripts, changes the way in which musicologists and liturgical scholars will view the images. Indeed, it will change the way in which they approach the unfolding history of chant and liturgy in the Carolingian period.
Historians typically single out the hundred-year period from about 1050 to 1150 as the pivotal moment in the history of the Latin Church, for it was then that the Gregorian Reform movement established the ecclesiastical structure that would ensure Rome’s dominance throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. In Before the Gregorian Reform John Howe challenges this familiar narrative by examining earlier, "pre-Gregorian" reform efforts within the Church. He finds that they were more extensive and widespread than previously thought and that they actually established a foundation for the subsequent Gregorian Reform movement. The low point in the history of Christendom came in the late ninth and early tenth centuries—a period when much of Europe was overwhelmed by barbarian raids and widespread civil disorder, which left the Church in a state of disarray. As Howe shows, however, the destruction gave rise to creativity. Aristocrats and churchmen rebuilt churches and constructed new ones, competing against each other so that church building, like castle building, acquired its own momentum. Patrons strove to improve ecclesiastical furnishings, liturgy, and spirituality. Schools were constructed to staff the new churches. Moreover, Howe shows that these reform efforts paralleled broader economic, social, and cultural trends in Western Europe including the revival of long-distance trade, the rise of technology, and the emergence of feudal lordship. The result was that by the mid-eleventh century a wealthy, unified, better-organized, better-educated, more spiritually sensitive Latin Church was assuming a leading place in the broader Christian world. Before the Gregorian Reform challenges us to rethink the history of the Church and its place in the broader narrative of European history. Compellingly written and generously illustrated, it is a book for all medievalists as well as general readers interested in the Middle Ages and Church history.
Experiencing Berlioz: A Listener’s Companion is an in-depth entrée into the sound world of Hector Berlioz, recognized today as one of the most profoundly original and engaging composers in 19th-century Europe. Melinda O’Neal offers the non-specialist a pathway into the underlying allure of Berlioz's music. His views on rehearsing and conducting, bumpy career ride and failures, the journey of a work through revisions and editions, and historical performance practices provide a backdrop to discussions of his most significant works. As O’Neal addresses the motivation and conception, sonic atmosphere, and compositional strategies of key works, she provides a new multifaceted experience not only to music historians and performers but also to any amateur music lover who has ever been entranced by Berlioz’s undeniable musical veracity. As the listener interacts with Berlioz's music, the ear's curiosity and imagination will take flight.
When did Anglo-Saxon monks begin to recite the daily hours of prayer, the Divine Office, according to the liturgical pattern prescribed in the Rule of St Benedict? Going beyond the simplistic assumptions of previous scholarship, this book reveals that the early Anglo-Saxon Church followed a non-Benedictine Office tradition inherited from the Roman missionaries; the Benedictine Office arrived only when tenth-century monastic reformers such as Dunstan and Æthelwold decided that "true" monks should not use the same Office liturgy as secular clerics, a decision influenced by eighth- and ninth-century Frankish reforms. The author explains, for the first time, how this reduced liturgical diversity in the Western Church to a basic choice between "secular" and "monastic" forms of the Divine Office; he also uses previously unedited manuscript fragments to illustrate the differing attitudes and Continental connections of the English Benedictine reformer, and to show that survivals of the early Anglo-Saxon liturgy may be identifiable in later medieval sources.
For earlier medieval Christians, the Bible was the book of guidance above all others, and the route to religious knowledge, used for all kinds of practical purposes, from divination to models of government in kingdom or household. This book's focus is on how medieval people accessed Scripture by reading, but also by hearing and memorizing sound-bites from the liturgy, chants and hymns, or sermons explicating Scripture in various vernaculars. Time, place and social class determined access to these varied forms of Scripture. Throughout the earlier medieval period, the Psalms attracted most readers and searchers for meanings. This book's contributors probe readers' motivations, intellectual resources and religious concerns. They ask for whom the readers wrote, where they expected their readers to be located and in what institutional, social and political environments they belonged; why writers chose to write about, or draw on, certain parts of the Bible rather than others, and what real-life contexts or conjunctures inspired them; why the Old Testament so often loomed so large, and how its law-books, its histories, its prophetic books and its poetry were made intelligible to readers, hearers and memorizers. This book's contributors, in raising so many questions, do justice to both uniqueness and diversity.